I absolutely agree. Not being able to externalize data has had a huge effect upon sharing modules. Our plan for the next major release of Puppet this year is

I absolutely agree. Not being able to externalize data has had a huge effect upon sharing modules. Our plan for the next major release of Puppet this year is to integrate Hiera deeply into Puppet in a more native manner. http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/hiera http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/hiera We're still building out the plan, and will be sending it out to the community soon for comment, but the basic idea is that parameterized class parameter lookup will automatically consult a hierarchical store like Hiera if values are not supplied directly. Much like Hiera has now, there will also be an easy function to grab arbitrary data values outside of class parameters.